Iraqi Jews Try and Celebrate Passover

Published 8:00 pm, Wednesday, April 16, 2003

The rallying cry of centuries of Jews is a fading echo this Passover in Baghdad, among a disappearing, dispirited remnant of an ancient and important Jewish community.

"Somebody used to know how to make `seder'" _ the traditional Passover dinner _ "but not me," a sad young woman, at 37 one of youngest Iraqi Jews in Baghdad, said Thursday, first day of the seven-day holiday commemorating the Jews' flight to freedom from Egypt.

The woman, a dentist named Khalida Fuad Eliahu, is herself desperate to flee.

"I just want to go," she said. "I don't want to live here."

But she doesn't want to escape to Jerusalem, with its persistent bloodshed. "I have lived through one, two, three wars in Iraq. I don't want a fourth war."

Some might think this third war in Iraq, the toppling of the Saddam Hussein government, opens a new window for the 40 to 60 Jews in Baghdad.

Sasson Saleh pondered the question in his dark single room up the street from the Jews' small synagogue.

"It means a lot for Iraqis, but not for Jews," said Saleh, sharp features still handsome at 90. "It doesn't matter whether Saddam rules us or another man rules us. They" _ Iraq's Muslims _ "don't care for us."

In Israel these days, Iraqi Jewish immigrants speak wistfully of returning to this Arab homeland, which fought in repeated wars against the Jewish state.

"They'll never come back," Saleh said, speaking fluent English honed as a civil servant in Iraq's long-ago British colonial administration.

What of Baghdad's Jews? Will they leave now that they're freer to do so?

"They're too old," he said. "I think in five years, at the most, there will be no Jews left in Baghdad."

If so, it will sound the knell for a community that stretches back millennia, to the "Babylonian captivity" of 10,000 Jews seized from the conquered kingdom of Judah and brought here in 597 B.C.

Some of their descendants soon returned to their homeland, but many remained here on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, down the generations, and by the mid-20th century they numbered some 250,000, including some of the city's most prominent merchants, bankers, doctors and engineers.

For centuries under the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Muslims and Jews generally lived peacefully together here. By the 1940s, however, Nazi-inspired pogroms terrorized the Jewish community, and after Israel's founding in 1948, about two-thirds of Iraq's Jewish population left for new beginnings there.

Thousands more left through the years, amid discrimination and persecution that ebbed and flowed. After the Arab defeat in the 1967 Mideast war, some Iraqi Jews were hanged in public as alleged Israeli spies.

Still, "we've been living together as Muslims and Jews for years without problems," insisted Mahdi Saleh, 53, a Muslim who works for the Jewish community as a liaison to the Iraqi government.

The recent buildup to war sharpened tensions for everyone in Baghdad, however. The synagogue's rabbi left the country some months ago, and the recognized leader of the Jewish community has withdrawn from public view, taking the keys to the tan-brick temple with him. No religious services have been held for weeks.

"Why do Passover?" asked Tawfiq Sofer, about 90 years old, a former lector who resides in a tiny house behind the synagogue, in a tattered neighborhood called Bataween not far from the Tigris riverbank. People can barely buy ordinary bread these days in Baghdad, let alone the unleavened variety needed for a Passover seder.

The intense, long-tressed Eliahu, a single woman living with her mother and brother, said repeatedly her pain comes from her inability to "socialize," to find other Jews.

"I'm alone. I'm afraid. I can't say I'm Jewish," she said, and yet she also can't envision living in Israel. When she took fright at a journalist's Iraqi driver, imagining him a government security man, she suddenly began to weep.

"I want my prayers back!" she said.

Sasson Saleh found his prayers again over the past 19 years, living on the community's charity.

"I pray morning and night," he said. "I read the Talmud, all of it. I know it by heart."

As bombs fell, then, this old Jew, in dark, impoverished solitude, may have found the psalm of his forbears, the psalm of ancient exile, a verse that speaks to today: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion."